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The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor
Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Chicago
Cedric de Leon
Providence College
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The Origins of Right to Work: Antilabor Democracy in NineteenthCentury Chicago
Abstract
[Excerpt] “Right to work” states weaken collective bargaining rights and limit the ability of unions to
effectively advocate on behalf of workers. As more and more states consider enacting right-to-work laws,
observers trace the contemporary attack on organized labor to the 1980s and the Reagan era. In The Origins of
Right to Work, however, Cedric de Leon contends that this antagonism began a century earlier with the
Northern victory in the U.S. Civil War, when the political establishment revised the English common-law
doctrine of conspiracy to equate collective bargaining with the enslavement of free white men.
In doing so, de Leon connects past and present, raising critical questions that address pressing social issues.
Drawing on the changing relationship between political parties and workers in nineteenth-century Chicago,
de Leon concludes that if workers’ collective rights are to be preserved in a global economy, workers must
chart a course of political independence and overcome long-standing racial and ethnic divisions.
Keywords
Chicago, free labor, antilabor, democracy, 19th century, right-to-work, unions
Disciplines
Collective Bargaining | Labor Relations | Unions
Comments
The abstract, table of contents, and first twenty-five pages are published with permission from the Cornell
University Press. For ordering information, please visit the Cornell University Press.
This article is available at DigitalCommons@ILR: http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/books/107
THE ORIGINS
OF RIGHT
TO WORK
Antilabor Democracy in
Nineteenth-Century Chicago
Cedric de Leon
ILR PRESS
AN IM PRINT OF
CORNELL U N IVE R S ITY PRESS
ITHACA AND LONDON
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts
thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from
the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512
East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 2015 by Cornell University Press
First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2015
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Leon, Cedric de, author.
The origins of right to work : antilabor democracy in nineteenth-century
Chicago / Cedric de Leon,
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8014-5308-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8014-7958-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Open and closed shop—Illinois—Chicago—History— 19th century.
2. Labor— Illinois— Chicago—History— 19th century. 3. Labor movement—
Illinois—Chicago—History— 19th century. 4. Working class—Political
activity—Illinois—Chicago—History— 19th century. 5. Political parties—
Illinois—Chicago—History— 19th century. 6. Chicago (111.)—Politics and
government— 19th century. I. Title.
HD6488.2.U6L46 2015
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2014043953
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Contents
Preface
ix
1. Tracing the Origins of Right to Work
2 . The Critique of Wage Dependency, 1828-1844
3 . The Political Crisis over Slavery and the Rise of
Free Labor, 1844-1860
4 . The War Years, or the Triumphs and Reversals of
Free Labor Ideology, 1861-1865
5 . Antilabor Democracy and the Working
Class, 1865-1887
Epilogue: Neoliberalism in the Rustbelt
1
24
96
130
Notes
References
Index
149
153
167
49
78
1
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT
TO WORK
On December 6, 2012, a Republican-controlled Michigan legislature passed
“right to work” legislation, allowing workers in this longtime labor stronghold to
receive the benefits of union contracts without having to pay the dues or com­
parable service fees that support the daily operation of unions. Amid mounting
protests from thousands of union members outside the state capitol in Lansing,
Republican governor Rick Snyder said that the law was “about being pro-worker,
about giving the freedom to choose who they associate with.” Though “right to
work” laws make it extremely difficult for unions to represent their members and
secure strong contracts, Governor Snyder added, “I support the unions in many
regards; I support their right to organize. This has nothing to do with collective
bargaining. I continue to be an advocate of collective bargaining in Michigan.”
State Senate majority leader Randy Richardville echoed Mr. Snyder’s sentiments.
He said, “I have long been a supporter of collective bargaining, but whether you
support collective bargaining or not, it should be the worker’s freedom to choose
whether or not he or she belongs to a union ... what this ultimately comes down
to is the individual worker” (Skubick 2012).
A century and a half earlier, in another midwestern town just three hours
west of Lansing, Republican mayor and Chicago Tribune editor, Joseph Medill,
spoke before throngs of Chicago workers striking for the eight-hour day. In a
move of either astonishing faith in his fellow man or outright effrontery, Medill
declared, “Journeymen have the lawful right to combine by trades or unions andl
l
2
CHAPTER 1
determine the conditions on which they will exchange their labor for wages, but
they have no legal right to compel any outside worker to accept their conditions
or to sell his labor only at their price, for that would be to destroy his personal
freedom and liberty of action” (Chicago Tribune, May 16, 1872,4).
Though separated by 140 years, the two sets of statements are based on the
same premise. The spokesmen of the Republican Party, past and present, con­
cede the right of workers to assemble and to set rules for their own organiza­
tions, but employ the rhetoric of liberty in ways that delegitimize the workers’
most effective strategies for improving their wages and working conditions. In
each case, the weakening of workers’ collective power is justified as a safeguard
to individual freedom. Governor Snyder speaks of the worker’s right to associ­
ate with whomever he or she likes, while Medill cautions against infringing on
the individual worker’s “personal freedom and liberty of action.” Although free
riders are often reviled for reaping all the benefits of the team’s efforts while
doing none of the work, these appeals insist that the free rider is entitled to shirk
his duty. They encourage workers to accept the higher wages and benefits that
unions are able to negotiate relative to nonunion workplaces, while not contrib­
uting financially to house and staff the organization, advertise its objectives, and
mobilize the rank-and-file behind a common list of demands. Beyond shrink­
ing the operational budgets of labor organizations, the “right to work” dulls the
urgency of collective action. If workers are unwilling to contribute dues, they are
unlikely to put themselves out in other ways as well: they might choose not to
sign a public petition, attend a rally, or walk a picket line. In sum, the “right to
work” encourages wholesale divestment from the financial and organizational
means through which unions can bring pressure to bear on recalcitrant employ­
ers and then frames the resulting power imbalance as the moral imperative of a
free society.
This book is about the bait-and-switch that has historically constrained
American workers’ freedom under liberal capitalist democracy; enticed with the
American Dream, they are simultaneously denied a collective route to fulfill its
promise. I trace the present moment back to the time of Joseph Medill when
employment relations were being rewritten in the context of slave emancipa­
tion. It was then that the United States became an antilabor democracy—one
that, despite occasional assurances to the contrary, was hostile to the notion that
workers possessed any rights beyond the ability to bargain one-on-one with their
employers.
This is not to say that American workers are forever doomed by history or that
a more progressive future was somehow foreclosed by the end of the nineteenth
century.1 It is to say, rather, that workers have had, and must therefore always
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
3
be prepared, to defend their hard-won collective rights in the face of a political
and economic system that was set up to preserve only the right of individuals to
negotiate the terms and conditions of their employment.
That outcome was hardly preordained, for both antebellum politicians and
workers were deeply critical of the individual wage contract, often calling it wage
“dependency” or “slavery,” because it rendered white men subservient to a mas­
ter class. This arrangement was less troubling when it was still possible for most
workers to start their own businesses and become master craftsmen themselves,
but political discourse shifted as workers became permanently mired in wage
labor. The cost of doing business increased even as workers earned and saved less,
thus putting a life of economic independence out of reach to all but the wealthi­
est merchants, manufacturers, and commercial farmers. Accordingly, during the
Jacksonian era (1828-1844), the Democratic and opposition Whig parties often
framed their competing economic policies as ones that would enable white men
to escape wage dependency and become self-sufficient farmers. Between 1846
and 1861, as Americans colonized the land that would become the continental
United States, the major parties fractured over whether slavery should be permit­
ted in the new western territories. All factions agreed, however, that the goal of
land policy should be to preserve a path to self-sufficiency for less affluent white
men. Indeed, it was only in the years immediately after the Civil War that the
wage contract became understood in mainstream political discourse as a safe­
guard to personal liberty. Politicians, in what became known as the doctrine of
“free contract,” held that even the poorest white man was free, because no one
could make him enter into a wage contract unless he agreed to the terms. Yet
even then, it was the political establishment that espoused that view, while work­
ers rejected it as a fancy reinterpretation of wage slavery.
If free wage labor is the central feature of capitalism—its sine qua non as
Marx, Weber, and countless others have argued—then the emerging industrial
order had something less than the full-throated political support of antebellum
actors. Accordingly, any adequate examination of workers’ place in the transi­
tion to liberal democracy must reconcile the persistent critique of wage depend­
ency with the outpouring of support among Northern workers for the cause of
“free labor” prior to and during the Civil War. The ensuing chapters address the
following puzzle: Why did the critics of wage dependency reorganize in favor
of liberal capitalist democracy only to reject it shortly thereafter? While other
accounts (e.g., Hattam 1993; Stanley 1998) emphasize the importance of the law
and social actors on the ground (e.g., classes, ethnic groups, voters), I argue that
mass parties pressed formerly adversarial class and ethnic voting blocs into the
service of liberal capitalist democracy and then incurred the wrath of immigrant
4
CHAPTER 1
workers when they abandoned the critique of wage dependency in favor the doc­
trine of free contract and its core implication, the right to work.
Specifically, my answer unfolds in a narrative of the changing relationship
between political parties and workers, for the key is to understand that while
the critique of wage dependency persisted, its target changed through three
phases of partisan struggle. In the Jacksonian era, the close relationship between
Democrats and workers was built on that party’s populist critique of economic
dependency, on the one hand, and the increasing inability of workers to escape
such dependency, on the other. But in 1846 both the Democrats and the Whigs
became internally divided over the question of slavery extension. The crisis
shifted the terms of political debate away from the critique of wage depend­
ency under capitalism toward a critique of dependency under slavery. Instead
of arguing about the tyranny of banks and other economic institutions, par­
ties and workers debated whether southern planters would monopolize western
lands and thereby prevent workers from becoming independent farmers. In the
North, the specter of a “slave power conspiracy” reshuffled the parties’ electoral
bases, uniting previously antagonistic class and ethnic voting blocs (i.e., elites
and nonelites; native-born and foreign-born) into a grand free labor coalition
under the leadership of the Republican Party.
This is only half the answer, however, for while the first two phases explain
why the critics of wage dependency came to the defense of free labor, antebellum
politics do not explain why workers later rebelled against the very social order
they helped to establish. This is where the third phase in the relationship between
parties and workers comes into play—a phase during which Joseph Medill
loomed large. Northern workers bought, and Republicans sold, the claim that
barring slavery from the western territories would allow them to escape wage
dependency in the nation’s cities. What workers did not— and could not—know
is that the North’s triumph in the Civil War would be used to delegitimize col­
lective bargaining.
As labor unrest mounted during and immediately after the war, the major
parties despaired of a strategy to settle the so-called labor question and return to
issues like the tariff that once peaceably organized the terms of political debate.
Eventually, both parties advanced a contractual vision of free society. In con­
trast to its previous incarnation as a slaveholding republic where some laborers
were forced into the service of their masters, the republic—now formally without
slavery—would protect the right of all workers to exchange their labor freely in
a one-on-one negotiation with their employers. Workers, recognizing that the
doctrine of free contract was merely a glorified version of wage dependency, were
persuaded by trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists to reject the major parties’
appeal in favor of strikes, boycotts, independent third parties, and revolution.
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
5
The political establishment responded by drawing a powerful implication from
the doctrine of free contract, the right to work, and used it both as a rhetorical tool
to mobilize those frightened by labor’s uprising and as a rationale for antilabor
state violence. A trade union, politicians argued, coerced individual employers
and workers into a collective agreement that was tantamount to the enslave­
ment of free white men. Collective agreements prevented the individual’s “right
to work” at whatever wage he wanted, while simultaneously prohibiting another
individual, the employer, from paying that wage. Revising the English common
law doctrine of labor conspiracy, postbellum political elites imposed a double
standard on the modern employment relation. Though late nineteenth-century
employers were incorporated increasingly as combinations like partnerships, cor­
porations, and companies, the right to work framed the employer combination as
a free rights-bearing individual, a “corporate person,” and the labor combination
as a conspiracy in restraint of trade. Having constructed both trade unionism and
the slave power as plots subversive of individual liberty, northern party leaders
ordered the police and military to break strikes and eradicate the labor movement
just as they did the Southern rebellion. Thus, the Northern victory in the war was
prolabor to the degree that it ended the institution of slavery, but antilabor in the
sense that it enabled political elites to forcibly subdue workers’ collective attempts
to address economic inequality under capitalism.
To bring these complex dynamics to life, I use the case of Chicago, Illinois
from the beginning of the Jacksonian era in 1828 through the Gilded Age, ending
with the infamous Haymarket Affair of 1886-1887.1 weave the national and local
contexts together by showing that factionalism among state and local parties dis­
rupted coalitions of voting blocs in the electorate. I track ward-level electoral
returns over time as well as the shifting rhetoric of party leaders and workers on
the issue of wage dependency. The data suggest three things. First, the base of the
Jacksonian Democratic Party was a coalition of immigrant (primarily German
and Irish) majority-worker wards. Second, the Republican base during the politi­
cal crisis over slavery was a coalition of German majority-worker and native-born
middle-class to affluent wards. Finally, the industrial strife of the postbellum
period alienated Chicago workers from the major parties, leading the former to
establish revolutionary organizations and a Workingman’s Party. Throughout
this period, the grist of Chicago politics was the discourse of dependency, but
its character changed and its capacity to bind workers to the two-party system
waned. When that happened, the political establishment used the right to work
to justify and ultimately enact its repression of the labor movement.
I extend the long-standing scholarly conversation on democratic transitions,
American exceptionalism, and related dynamics, through a focus on political
parties. Parties politicize and depoliticize—in theoretical parlance “articulate”
6
CHAPTER 1
and “disarticulate”—social divisions such as region, race, and class as they strug­
gle for power and in the process occasionally remake the social order. In that
capacity, parties may mobilize coalitions for and against democratic reform and
incline or disincline communities toward certain types of social organization
such as capitalism or socialism. Parties, however, are not omnipotent. When they
fail to do the work of articulation or when their articulatory projects fall flat, the
governed may withdraw their support, and political elites, in turn, may resort to
violence to preserve the social order as they did in the postbellum era. Nor are
party politics by any means the whole story. The economic, legal, and ethnoracial
contexts of this period each played a role in inaugurating the right to work and
the antilabor democracy that it justified. Adding the context of partisan struggle,
however, enriches our knowledge of this critical moment in American history,
for politicians interpreted, altered, and even directed these other areas of social
life. What is missing from existing accounts, in short, is the rough-and-tumble
world of party politics.
Alternative Theories of Antilabor Democracy
in the United States: First Order Implications
In my critical overview of the literature, I distinguish between the “first” and “sec­
ond” order implications of my argument. Although the act of “bringing parties
back in” contributes to a wide range of research, not all of it bears directly on the
relationship between labor and American democracy. By first order implications,
then, I refer to those bodies of work that address this relationship head-on. These
are the literatures on American exceptionalism, which examines the antilabor
tendencies in U.S. political culture, and democratization, which theorizes the
conditions favorable to democratic transitions and expansions. By second order
implications, I have in mind scholars for whom the relationship between labor
and democracy is a tangential or non-issue, but who are nevertheless impacted
by the claim that political parties shape social life. These include analysts of class
and racial identity as well as electoral politics.
American Exceptionalism
American exceptionalism denotes the vast literature that arose in response to
Werner Sombart’s ([1906] 1976) now century-old question, “Why is there no
socialism in the United States?” Those familiar with this research will know
that it supplies several alternative hypotheses to the one I propose here, ranging
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
7
from the complex to the monocausal and ahistorical. The latter include several
accounts of the putative “conservatism” of the American worker. I do not refute
these more problematic examples of the genre, because others have capably dis­
patched them elsewhere (see, for example, Katznelson 1981; Kimeldorf 1988;
Voss 1993), but I discuss three highly sophisticated answers to Sombart’s puzzle
that are of a historically sensitive variety.
Kim Voss’s foundational book, The Making of American Exceptionalism (1993),
was a response to the ahistorical accounts alluded to above. Contrary to claims
that American workers were intrinsically allergic to socialism, Voss insisted that
the Knights of Labor, the hugely popular late-nineteenth-century labor federa­
tion, had cultivated a homegrown working class radicalism that was every bit
as critical of capitalism as its European counterparts were, going as far as to call
for the abolition of the wage system itself. However, the Haymarket Affair of
1886-1887, in which anarchists were accused of throwing a dynamite bomb at
police in Chicago, led to the violent suppression of the Knights nationwide and
forced the American labor movement in a more conservative direction.
Though Voss rightly emphasizes the centrality of antilabor state violence in
the postbellum order, her periodization is somewhat at odds with the histori­
cal record in two respects. First, the Knights’ critique of wage dependency had
a long pedigree and was once pervasive among political elites—that stratum of
actors that would later order the police and military to forcibly subdue the labor
movement. Second, large-scale antilabor violence occurred well before Haymar­
ket (for instance, in the nationwide railroad strike of 1877), yet those episodes of
state coercion failed to put the labor movement in a defensive crouch. To bridge
these gaps, we require an alternative account that can accommodate both the
early critique of wage dependency and the growing divergence between workers
and political elites on that question over time.
Another highly influential group of scholars in the American exceptionalist tradition consists of those who emphasize the enduring hold of the English
common law doctrine of labor conspiracy as well as its institutionalization in
the judicial system (see, for example, Hattam 1993; Steinfeld 1991; Tomlins
1992). Victoria Hattam’s now canonical work in this area is a prime example.
Her research was largely a response to other legal scholars, who held that an early
Massachusetts Supreme Court case, Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), essentially
legalized labor unions in the United States (Hattam 1992, 47-48). In contrast to
the Hunt thesis, Hattam argued that antilabor prosecution under the conspiracy
doctrine continued well after 1842, picking up precipitously from the Civil War
to the 1880s, when judges began to use the injunction as a new tool to thwart
strikes. The implications of her research went beyond legal studies to explain
8
CHAPTER 1
American exceptionalism, for, she argued, it was the judiciary that compelled the
labor movement to advance a more conservative set of strategies in improving
workers’ lot under capitalism.
Legal scholars have contributed mightily to our understanding of the U.S.
labor movement, but they have largely sidestepped or downplayed the impor­
tance of political parties in this process. In formulating her judiciary thesis, for
instance, Hattam directly undercut the notion, first propounded by Sombart,
that the American two-party system smothered progressive third party alterna­
tives (1993, ix). Another example of this tendency is Amy Dru Stanley’s (1998)
From Bondage to Contract, according to which social scientists, abolitionists,
labor reformers, and jurists—but not parties—placed freedom of contract at the
center of the postbellum social order.
The deliberate exclusion of parties runs into several problems. To begin, in the
American system of “party go vernment,” politicians controlled the very means
of violence that the state used against labor and shaped jurisprudence on worker
rights by becoming judges themselves, often running, and being elected, on a
party slate. U.S. Supreme Court justice Melville W. Fuller, for instance, was a
staunch Chicago Democrat and was instrumental in crafting that party’s anti­
labor position before he was elevated to the court. Indeed, free contract and
the right to work together comprised a language of mass mobilization that the
political establishment had hoped would galvanize a silent majority, who were
terrified of labor’s revolutionary fervor. This was so much the case that in Illi­
nois, labor conspiracy was encoded not in a body of jurisprudence handed down
by judges based on legal precedent, but in statutory laws authored by politicians
in the state legislature in direct response to large-scale job actions. The role of
political parties remains an untold part of the story that Hattam and others have
capably begun to tell.
I end this commentary on the American exceptionalist tradition with a book
that is peculiar for placing parties at its center: Ira Katznelson’s (1981) City
Trenches. On his account, political parties, beginning in the antebellum period,
mobilized workers according to ethnic identity, while relatively tolerant labor
laws (e.g., Commonwealth v. Hunt) allowed American workers to resolve their
workplace grievances through trade unions. The historical split in American
workers’ consciousness—class identity at work, ethnic identity at home—has
prevented a more progressive and structural challenge to capitalism, which
would apply a militant class analysis not only to the workplace, but to society as
a whole.
Katznelson did what few other analysts had done apart from Sombart him­
self, which was to argue for the role of parties in precluding socialism in the
United States. Yet, putting aside the problematic characterization of the Hunt
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
9
ruling, City Trenches is hindered by an overemphasis on the politics of ethnicity.
Katznelson’s claim regarding the nature of urban electoral coalitions was based
on an influential school of historiography at the time of the book’s publication
that rewrote antebellum political history to reflect the dominance of ethnoreli­
gious divisions (Benson 1961; Formisano 1971). But as more recent syntheses
suggest, ethnicity was only one of several important modes of political identi­
fication in the American case. For example, I argue here and elsewhere that the
mid-nineteenth-century Republican Party articulated workers as northern sub­
jects. This unified formerly antagonistic foreign- and native-born ethnic groups
in the free labor coalition and thereby undermined ethnic politics in their previ­
ous form. John B. Jentz and Richard Schneirov (2012) have likewise shown that
Chicago workers embraced a multiethnic class-based political identity after the
Civil War. I would add that workers did so, not in isolation from parties, but in
direct interaction with them: the politics of community and work were inter­
twined in Chicago, and those politics were as motivated by class as they were by
ethnicity. There is little room in Katznelson’s otherwise useful account for the
politicization of alternative or intersecting identities over time, due to a rela­
tively inflexible view of urban parties as ossified ethnic machines. This, in turn,
prevents an examination of the erratic trajectory of Chicago workers’ support of
free labor from the Jacksonian era, through the political crisis over slavery, and
on to the Gilded Age.2
Democratization
In reviewing the democratization literature, we go from inquiring into the
absence of a particular social order—socialism, to the presence of one—liberal
capitalist democracy. The most prominent studies on that subject hold that
democratization occurs because of the mobilization of competing class coali­
tions, though they differ on which social class is the most consistent vanguard
of democratic change. For Barrington Moore (1966), it is the bourgeoisie. For
Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986), democratic coalitions
result from bargaining among antagonistic factions of the elite. For Dietrich
Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John Stephens (1992), the working
class is the most consistent advocate of democratic reform; whereas for Jeffrey
Paige (1997), neoliberal democracy’s prime movers in late twentieth-century
Central America were the informal urban sector and rural workers.
The exclusive emphasis on class dynamics, however, leaves a number of ques­
tions unanswered about the case at hand. Take, for example, Moore’s famous
typology of the three routes to the modern world. That typology is essentially
a story of winners and losers. The fascist or reactionary route is taken when a
10
CHAPTER 1
weak bourgeoisie joins with powerful landowners to repress peasants and work­
ers. The communist route to modernity entails the opposite outcome: workers
and peasants successfully mobilize to dispossess landed and urban elites. Finally,
when a strong bourgeoisie unites with nonelites to defeat large landowners, the
outcome is liberal democracy (Moore 1966, 413).
Thus, in the American case, a strong northeastern industrial class led midwestern farmers in a war that eventuated in the defeat of southern planters.
The bourgeois-farmer alliance, Moore argued, was made possible by the North­
east’s increasing reliance on midwestern consumers and the simultaneous turn
in southern trade toward Great Britain in the 1850s. Shifting markets allowed
northeastern industrialists and southern planters to walk away from each other
despite a long history of economic interdependence. In addition, the conver­
gence of northeastern and midwestern class interests shattered a preexisting agri­
cultural alliance between the Midwest and the South, which “helped to make
unnecessary for a time the characteristic reactionary coalition between urban
and landed elites” (Moore 1966, 140-141).
There are numerous empirical and analytical problems with this account.
Though the North’s victory in the Civil War served the interests of capital more
than those of free white labor, and though a cross-class coalition was critical to
the rise of liberal democracy, Moore was wrong about the class coalitions of the
antebellum period, due largely to his inattention to political parties. Farmers
and workers of all regions, even in the South, tended to vote for the Democratic
Party, whereas industrialists and planters tended to vote for the Whigs. Antebel­
lum class coalitions, according to Moore’s typology, were thus predictive of the
fascist and communist routes to modernity. Furthermore, the bourgeoisie was
by no means in a strong position to rule, for the Whig Party was perpetually in
opposition, while the Democrats dominated antebellum politics. If Moore was
right about the Northeast-Midwest alliance that eventually prosecuted the war,
then he left a crucial question unanswered: Why did rank-and-file Democrats
leave their party to unite with their adversaries in the Whig Party, over whom
they enjoyed at least political, if not economic, dominance?3
Looking ahead to the postbellum period, we might ask another question: If
the Northeast-Midwest coalition made a reactionary alliance against farmers and
workers “unnecessary,” why did the end of the war witness the violent repression
of precisely these sectors of society? As one anonymous reviewer of this book
insightfully pointed out when comparing U.S. Reconstruction to the Arab Spring
in Egypt, we must explain why bad things end up happening to good people.
The problems with the democratization literature, then, are really not just about
the focus on social class with its resulting inattention to party dynamics, but
also about a focus on the moment of transition itself, with much less emphasis
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
11
on its aftermath. Yiching Wu’s (2014) work on the Chinese Cultural Revolution
refers to this vexing moment as “demobilization,” because Mao and his allies
were confronted with the challenge of having to wind down the revolution after
they themselves had incited it. Similarly, we might ask whether Reconstruction
was a moment in which Northern political elites felt it necessary to confront the
revolutionary fervor of the free labor coalition, as workers connected the dots
from the emancipation of black slaves to their own unrequited emancipation
from industrial servitude.
Alternative Theories of Class, Racial and Electoral
Politics: Second Order Implications
Having thus pointed out the gaps in the literatures that bear directly on the rela­
tionship between labor and American democracy, we turn now to those scholars
for whom that relationship is less central. This section explores the ways in which
an inattention to parties leads to a number of open questions about the factors
affecting voting behavior and the formation of class and racial identity.
Subjectivist Theories of Working Class Formation
A book about collective bargaining and the frustration thereof presupposes that
workers at some point became conscious of the need for collective action. In the
humanities and social sciences that process is often called “working class for­
mation” or just “class formation.” Though the details of this process have been
debated since Marx’s time, the debate reemerged with renewed vigor in the sec­
ond half of the twentieth century. The two great camps in that debate correspond
to what Pierre Bourdieu (1989) once called the “objectivist” and “subjectivist”
moments of class.
For objectivists, workers are always and already a class by virtue of their struc­
tural location at the bottom of the capitalist system. The fact that workers do not
own the means of production (e.g., factories, land) while their employers do,
automatically places the two groups in different social classes, whose compet­
ing economic interests all but ensure that theirs will be a relationship of mutual
hostility (see, for example, Anderson 1980,40; Dahrendorf 1959, 148-149; Marx
and Engels [1848] 1998; Wright 1990, 272).
Subjectivists countered that such arguments lead scholars to unfairly chas­
tise workers for not behaving in appropriately revolutionary or “classlike” ways
(Mann 1973, 32-33; Parkin 1979; Somers 1997, 77). Accordingly, subjectivists
advanced a more forgiving framework. On their account, workers must first
12
CHAPTER 1
identify as a class before one can say definitively that such a class has come into
existence. Moreover, workers arrive at that identity in their own way and time,
often in the course of labor disputes with their employers. The myriad historical
and cultural factors impinging on a specific case of class formation imply that the
process may or may not culminate in the revolutionary endgame that objectivists
hope for and expect given workers’ exploitation under capitalism (see, for exam­
ple, Katznelson and Zolberg 1985; Steinmetz 1992; E. P. Thompson 1963, 9,11).
The subjectivists prevailed in that debate, owing largely to their openness to
the plain fact that workers have not always, nor in the same fashion, embraced
an insurrectionary class politics. Indeed, one might plausibly argue that subjec­
tivist theories of working class formation are flexible enough to accommodate
the erratic trajectory of workers’ politics in the mid-nineteenth-century United
States.
Subjectivists generally assume that when workers embrace class identity, they
do so in the context of the workplace and in opposition to their employers. Yet
the trajectory of class formation in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago does not fit
neatly with that assumption. The anger of Chicago workers was directed not only
at their employers, but also at southern planters and political parties. The first
political organization of Chicago workers was a land reform league established
in 1848 to protest the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Workers
organized the city’s first unions as the slavery issue subsided in the early 1850s,
but organizing dropped off as the controversy over slavery extension reemerged.
Unions surfaced again during the Civil War, and it was then that workers began
increasingly to identify as a class unto themselves, instead of as northerners
together with the farmers and employers of their section. Moreover, while work­
ers’ analyses of their deteriorating conditions in the postbellum period refer­
enced unscrupulous employers, they reserved a distinct animosity for the major
political parties, whom they accused of abandoning the critique of wage depend­
ency in favor of free market liberalism. In short, the historical development of
Chicago working class politics requires an alternative theory based on contexts
outside the workplace.
New Immigrant Groups and White Racial Identity
The Republican Party mobilized northern workers of European descent by
arguing that the westward migration of southern planters would render them
industrial slaves, no better than their agricultural counterparts to the South.
Organized worker opposition to slavery extension, which began in the 1840s as
the parties took up the issue, was therefore partly an attempt to claim the privi­
leges of whiteness, chief among these being access to cheap land.
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
13
This claim requires a serious engagement with “whiteness studies,” a subfield
in the scholarship on U.S. race relations. The latter proceeds from the assump­
tion that racial identity is fundamentally a relational construct: the notion that
some people are “black,” for example, is meaningless outside a racial cosmol­
ogy or hierarchy in which others are not. Students of whiteness seek to shift
scholarly attention from people of color toward the dominant racial group,
without whom the very notion of “color” would be impossible. From there, this
perspective advances two key analytical claims. First, Anglo-Americans did not
automatically view other immigrants of European descent (e.g., Irish, Jews) as
white and therefore one of them. Accordingly, the research on whiteness has
tended to focus on the ways in which new immigrant groups mobilized to claim
the “privileges” or “wages” of whiteness. These include access to coveted jobs,
low-interest home mortgages, college admissions, and political power. Second,
the literature suggests that whites justify the imbalance in resources that such
privileges engender by resorting to the rhetorical themes of abstract liberalism
such as individual freedom and choice. For example, numerous studies point
out that whites rationalized their opposition to residential desegregation dur­
ing the Civil Rights era by insisting on their freedom to pick their friends and to
send their children to neighborhood public schools (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Brodkin
1998; Citron 1969; Cohen 2003; de Leon 2011; de Leon et al 2009; DuBois [1935]
1998; Hirsch 1983; Ignatiev 1995; Jackson 1985; Katznelson 2005; Lassiter 2006;
Lipsitz 1998; MacLean 2006; Mills [2002] 2004; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Roediger 1991; Sugrue 1996, 2008). Thus, Mills writes that the “framing of the United
States as... [a] liberal democracy... has facilitated and underwritten ... massive
evasions on the issue of racial injustice” ([2002] 2004, 239).
Though whiteness studies have greatly extended our understanding of
U.S. race relations by focusing attention on the “unmarked” dominant group,
the field is nevertheless somewhat ill-equipped to handle the case at hand in
two respects. To begin, the aforementioned privileges are said to result largely
from state transfer payments, laws, and regulations that favor whites and dis­
advantage nonwhites. But as Stephen Skowronek famously observed, the early
to mid-nineteenth-century American state was fundamentally a weak state of
“courts and parties” (1982, 24). That is, it did not possess the administrative
capacities of the New Deal welfare state, for instance, which was responsible for
institutionalizing many of the white privileges in question. Thus, a more precise
account of nineteenth-century U.S. race relations must inquire into the ways in
which political parties and the judiciary used their own authority to mobilize
support for racial privileges. There is also the related problem of “periodization,”
the way in which scholars view the development of white racial identity over
time. Mills and others rightly suggest that the rhetoric of liberal democracy has
14
CHAPTER 1
been used to justify a racialized distribution of power and resources, but lib­
eralism, as I imply above, only began to eclipse competing ideologies like the
critique of wage dependency after the Civil War. Indeed, the idea of a free soci­
ety based on voluntary individual contracts was liberalism’s way of justifying
wage dependency in a political and economic order suddenly without slavery.
Any research designed to explain the trajectory of European immigrant workers’
racial identity from the early to the late nineteenth century must therefore nec­
essarily begin with an examination of white racial formation before the advent
of liberal democracy. Yet, with the notable exceptions of Theodore Allen (1994),
Noel Ignatiev (1995), and David Roediger (1991), the literature on whiteness has
tended to center on post-Civil Rights race relations. Furthermore, when antebel­
lum race relations are taken seriously, it becomes clear that whites did more than
just resort to the convenient rhetorical themes of abstract liberalism to preserve
or gain access to resources: the partisan appeal to white racial identity was one of
several factors that made liberalism possible in the first place.
Voter-Centered Approaches to Electoral Politics
Lastly, a book on the interaction of parties and workers pulls for an engagement
with the scholarship on electoral politics. The dominant approaches in that field
are voter-centered, meaning that the outcome of an election or series of elec­
tions is said to be due primarily to dynamics within the electorate itself (e.g., the
entrance of women into the workplace or the growing number of immigrant
voters). The goal of much of this literature is to identify the determinants of
“vote choice,” why a given voter'casts her ballot for one party or candidate but
not another. I have described the competing schools of thought elsewhere as the
“social voter,” “partisan voter,” and “issue voter” perspectives (de Leon 2014). The
social voter or “sociological” approach holds that individuals vote the way they
do out of loyalty to a social group such as one’s class or religion (e.g., she votes for
the Labour Party, because she is a worker; he votes for the Islamist party, because
he is Muslim) (Berelson et al. 1954; Knoke 1976; Lazarsfeld et al. [1944] 1948;
Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Manza and Brooks 1999). The partisan voter or “social
psychological” approach holds that the way one votes depends on her or his
long-standing familial loyalty to a political party, otherwise known as “party ID”
(e.g., she votes for that party, because her father and grandfather did) (Campbell
et al. 1954,1960; Converse 1964,1966; Key and Munger 1959; Miller and Shanks
1996; Smith 1989; Stokes 1963). Finally, the issue voter perspective explains dif­
ferences in vote choice based on one’s rational policy preferences (e.g., I am vot­
ing for that candidate, because I agree with her on abortion) (Black [1958] 1963;
Downs 1957; Enelow and Hinich 1984; Fiorina 1981; Hotelling 1929; Key 1966;
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
15
Kinder and Kiewiet 1981; Merrill and Grofman 1999; Nie et al. 1976; Pomper
1972; Smithies 1941).
The trouble with the social and partisan voter approaches is that individual
demographic characteristics and familial loyalties are generally stable. If a voter
is Protestant, for instance, she is unlikely to become Catholic in the next election
cycle or even in her remaining lifetime. Likewise, if one’s family has traditionally
voted for a certain party, that pattern is not likely to be overturned in the short
term. Yet in the decade and a half just prior to the Civil War, the allegiances of
voters across the United States shifted erratically. Between 1846 and 1848, for
example, the traditional voting blocs of the Whig and Democratic parties split
and recombined in unprecedented coalitions. In the next six years, the status
quo ante slipped back into place as the erstwhile strongholds of the major par­
ties became strongholds once more. The mid-1850s, however, witnessed a mass
exodus of voters from the major parties into the upstart political organizations
that eventually prosecuted the war. Antebellum voting behavior begs the fol­
lowing question: Why did the old parties lose control of their coalitions in the
mid-1840s and reestablish their hold between 1848 and 1854, only to squander
it so completely by 1860? Any account of the mid-nineteenth-century American
case must explain the volatility of electoral politics in that period, and stable
loyalties, whether to social group or party, are unable to do so.
The social voter approach in particular is hard pressed to explain why some
social cleavages or differences (e.g., class, race, religion) become politically sali­
ent at a given time, while others do not. To use another example, the distinction
between free and slave states—the so-called sectional cleavage between North
and South—had, by 1860, existed in the United States for almost a century with­
out a civil war. Similar debates over slavery had occurred in 1789,1819, and 1833,
all of which eventually receded as economic issues quickly returned to the fore.
We might therefore ask why the political crisis over slavery came to a head in
1860 and not before.
The theoretical traditions that comprise the issue voter approach are better
able to account for short-term shifts. The realignment tradition, for example,
holds that the advent of new issues (e.g., civil rights, the environment) in the
electorate has the power to disrupt existing patterns of party dominance (see,
for example, Abramson et al. 2010; Beck 1974; Brady 1988; Burnham 1970; Car­
mines and Stimson 1989; Key 1955, 1959; Sundquist 1983). One might argue
that in each triumph and reversal above, voters’ rational policy preferences sim­
ply changed.
There are at least three problems with this perspective. First, although schol­
ars of realignment employ competing metaphors (e.g., “flash points,” “evolu­
tion”) to describe the rise and fall of political regimes, most theories assume
16
CHAPTER 1
that power shifts rhythmically from one party to another over time (de Leon
2014; Pierson 2004). This sense of time, or “temporality” as academics call it,
has a mechanical feel in stark contrast to the turbulent temporality of partisan
struggle in practice. Second, the role of parties is unclear: one gets the sense that
political organizations are at the mercy of voters’ preferences, as if those pref­
erences are not themselves shaped by political campaigns. Finally, and perhaps
most important, there is the problematic assumption of rationality. If we assume
that the divergence in antebellum voter sentiment was due in part to the compet­
ing “interests” of Northerners and Southerners, then we come face to face with
a vexing analytical conundrum, namely, that Northern and Southern interests
predict precisely the wrong political outcome. The dispute between the North
and South turned on whether slavery should be permitted where it had never
before existed. If Northerners had let the South secede, they could have claimed
title to the West and prohibited the extension of slavery unilaterally. One might
very well argue that it was in the interest of Northern voters to let the South go
without a fight. Conversely, in seceding, Southerners effectively forfeited their
right to the western territories. One might suggest that it was in the interest of
Southerners to remain in the Union, reach a compromise, and thereby ensure
slavery’s expansion into the West albeit on a limited basis. Of course, as we now
know, the exact opposite occurred: Northerners moved to crush the Southern
rebellion, Southerners seceded from the republic and suffered the end of slavery
in defeat, while the total “cost” of that conflict (to put it in rational choice terms)
climbed to upward of 750,000 lives, the largest death toll of any war in American
history (Hacker 2011).
Political Articulation
I resolve the foregoing dilemmas by building on the theory of “political articula­
tion,” according to which, “party practices naturalize class, ethnic, and racial for­
mations as a basis of social division by integrating disparate interests and identities
into coherent sociopolitical blocs” (de Leon, Desai, and Tugal 2009, 194-195).
The theory may be broken down into three parts. First, parties make divi­
sions or cleavages such as class, race, and religion politically salient. This is not to
say that demographic differences are fictional. Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and
Muslims, for example, each have distinct (if related) traditions to be sure, but
whether they matter for the purposes of political division depends on whether
or not parties articulate them as a basis of contention. Next, parties go through
the trouble of politicizing social differences, because victory depends on the par­
ties’ ability to mobilize an enduring majority coalition; that is, to frame their
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
17
own supporters as the natural majority who should rule and their opponents’
supporters as the illegitimate minority who should not. Third, political articula­
tion is not just about the successful naturalization of cleavages, for the converse
implication is that coalitions unravel when parties fail to do the work of articula­
tion or else advance a vision of the social order that falls flat in the face of compet­
ing political projects. The reproduction of political power hinges on the ability
of parties to not only achieve but also maintain what Antonio Gramsci (1971)
called “hegemony,” the acquisition of mass consent to govern. Consent is by defi­
nition impermanent and thus always at risk. When the governed withdraw their
consent, power may then pass from hegemony to domination, such that political
elites give up on cultivating support through persuasion and instead coerce the
unruly masses into submission. It is this ongoing struggle between competing
political projects and the tension between coercion and consent that accounts
for both the short-term shifts leading up to the advent of antilabor democracy in
Chicago and the ensuing repression of the labor movement.
By comparison, the American exceptionalist tradition is somewhat limited
in its capacity to explain the historical emergence of the postbellum antilabor
regime, because it either sidelines the role of parties in government (e.g., in writ­
ing labor conspiracy laws and commanding the police and military) or assumes
an unchanging relationship between parties and workers (e.g., as primarily ethnic
in character). The political articulation framework solves this analytical problem
by pinpointing the rise of antilabor democracy at the end of three sequences of
party-worker interaction, when political elites abandoned the critique of wage
dependency in favor of the doctrine of free contract and the right to work.
The puzzle of U.S. democratization has two parts. The first is why midwestern
nonelites realigned with their erstwhile political adversaries in favor of a liberal
capitalist democracy. Here a focus on parties allows us to argue that Republicans
used the specter of a slave power conspiracy to shift the terms of political debate
away from a critique of wage dependency under capitalism to a critique of wage
dependency under slavery, thus unifying formerly adversarial voting blocs into a
northern free labor coalition. The second part of the democratization puzzle is
the reactionary response of political elites to the labor question. This I interpret
as an instance in which political parties, having attempted and failed to acquire
the consent of the governed, then secure the latter’s cooperation by force.
Moving on to second order implications, the seemingly paradoxical trajectory
of working class identity in this period likewise rests on the rise and fall of party
projects. Antebellum parties deployed the critique of wage dependency to articu­
late white workers first, as a class of “producers” together with white farmers, and
then, as northern “free labor” together with the white elites and farmers of their
section during the political crisis over slavery. The immediate postbellum period
18
CHAPTER 1
was an instance of failed articulation, for the parties’ contractual vision of a free
society offended workers who remained suspicious of wage dependency. Trade
unionists, socialists, and anarchists were then able to articulate workers to their
organizations as a class.
The scholarship on U.S. race relations must contend with (a) the fact that the
antebellum state was insufficiently developed to distribute racial privileges in the
way that the New Deal state later did; and (b) the fact that liberalism only began
to eclipse other political ideologies after the Civil War and thus cannot account
for why white racial identity had by that point already been so bound up with
the expectation of economic independence. I address these problems by demon­
strating that the concept of white privilege was advanced, not by the antebellum
state, but by antebellum politicians, who promoted territorial expansion and
land reform to workers of European descent as a solution to wage dependency.
Finally, the dominant voter-centered approaches to electoral politics are una­
ble to account for the political volatility of this period, both because of their
emphasis on long-term stable factors such as partisan and social group loyalties
and because of a focus on rational interests, which in this case lead away from civil
war. The trajectory of party development, by contrast, tracks much better with
the political behavior of American workers than these dominant approaches to
vote choice. The antebellum parties were once able to keep the focus of the polity
squarely on economic issues and away from slavery. However, the unexpected
defeat of Martin Van Buren for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1844
touched off a chain of partisan reactions and counter reactions, including a final
backlash that badly undermined the American party system’s ability to contain
the politicization of slavery. Specifically, Van Buren’s defeat fueled a pivot in pub­
lic policy toward territorial expansion, which begged the question of the status of
slavery in the new territories. The ensuing debate led to the exodus of Free Soil
Democrats and their base among immigrant workers into the Republican Party,
a brand new party that unified Democrats, Whigs, and all others who opposed
the westward expansion of slavery. After the war, when politicians pivoted yet
again and embraced the wage contract as a metaphor for freedom, immigrant
workers defected from the mainstream party system to unions, labor parties, and
revolutionary organizations.
By solving the above analytical problems in this way, this book aligns with a
long-standing, but now resurgent, scholarly emphasis on the influential role of
political parties in social life. Beyond Gramsci, scholars will no doubt recognize
that my arguments bear a remarkable resemblance to Adam Przeworski’s earlier
work on the ways in which socialist parties cultivate working class identity (e.g.,
Przeworski 1977; Przeworski and Sprague 1986). In addition, this book shares
much in common with classic historiographical accounts of the contentious
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
19
relationship between nineteenth-century American workers and political parties
(e.g., Hugins 1960; Montgomery 1967; Pessen 1967; Wilentz 1984). My claims
also dovetail with recent arguments about the role of political parties in abor­
tive democratic transitions (e.g., Redding 2003; Riley 2010), transitions to social
democracy (e.g., Desai and Riley 2007; Heller 1999), and transitions to free market
economies (e.g., Tugal 2009).4 Scholars of U.S. race relations tend to focus on the
antagonism between social groups (e.g., whites vs. non-whites) and racial states
(e.g., apartheid South Africa). Yet at least a few insist that political parties may
either downplay or heighten supposed racial differences (e.g., Chen 2009; Frymer
2008; Gerteis 2007; Hiers 2013; Redding 2003; Roediger 1991). With respect to
the research on electoral politics, an intrepid handful of sociologists have dared to
say that parties help us understand the sometimes infuriating outcomes of demo­
cratic life. Apart from Manali Desai, Dylan Riley, Cihan Tugal, and yours truly, the
list includes Ron Aminzade’s (1981, 1993) earlier work and the current work of
Stephanie Mudge (Mudge and Chen 2013) and Adam Slez (Slez and Martin 2007).
I am not the first sociologist in recent years to argue that parties matter. What
makes this book different from my colleagues’ work, however, is that it makes
political parties the focal point of synthesis, bringing together these otherwise
isolated bodies of work to explain the dynamics of labor movements, class and
racial formation, democratization, and electoral politics simultaneously. On this
account, parties stand at the intersection between the state and civil society. That
is, parties divide civil society into competing coalitions or blocs as they struggle
for power; in that role, they often shape and reshape class and ethnoracial iden­
tity. At the same time, parties control the system of nominations, appointments,
and elections to political office, which is to say that they hold the reins of state
power. They are thus able to further politicize social differences by, for example,
providing social services or tax breaks to some, while denying them to others.
But perhaps more insidiously, when the people reject the parties’ proffered vision
of society (i.e., who is the majority and who is the minority; who is good and
who is bad), from their perch atop the state, they are able to make laws, appoint
loyalists to the judiciary, and unleash the police and armed forces—all to the
disadvantage of their adversaries. As I demonstrate, the dual influence of politi­
cal parties on both the state and civil society has had vast repercussions for the
freedom of workers under liberal democracy.
Methods, Case Selection, and Data
Any case study of large-scale social transformations must confront three chal­
lenges. The first is the methodological legitimacy of single case analysis. In fact,
20
CHAPTER 1
comparative historical methodology has moved beyond the notion that a single
case is merely a single observation or data point, and thus can only generate
tentative theoretical claims. As Rueschemeyer has argued, case studies “can test
theoretical propositions as well, and they can offer persuasive explanations,” in
part because they must go through “frequent iterations of confronting” alter­
native “explanatory propositions with many data points.” This iterative pro­
cess of fitting theoretical ideas to the complexities of a single case, “allows for
a close matching of conceptual intent and empirical evidence” (Rueschemeyer
2003,318).
But if a single case can do so much, one might still ask, “why Chicago”? As the
queen city in the home state of both Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Doug­
las (the 1860 presidential nominees of the Republican and Democratic parties
respectively), Chicago was a key theater in the political crisis over slavery. It is no
coincidence, for example, that the Republicans chose Chicago to host the fate­
ful Republican National Convention of 1860, which nominated Lincoln for the
presidency. Douglas’s primary residence was in Chicago, and it was there that he
died two months after the South fired on Fort Sumter. Beyond housing the lead­
ership of the nation’s two great parties on the eve of battle, Chicago supplied the
vanguard of labor unrest that swept across the North during Reconstruction and
the Gilded Age. Not only the infamous Haymarket Affair of 1886-1887, but also
the nation’s first May Day strikes for an eight-hour day took place in Chicago.
The city’s English-language trade union paper, the Workingmans Advocate, was
both the organ of the Chicago labor movement and one of the most influential
labor journals in the country. With leadership comes grave responsibility, how­
ever, and Chicago workers bore the brunt of labor repression in this period. For
example, in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, police, military, and paramilitary
groups killed approximately thirty men and boys, many of whom were buried
anonymously in lime pits, while another 200 were wounded, the largest num­
ber of casualties of any city in the nationwide job action. This suggests that an
important rupture occurred in the politics of American workers during the postbellum period and that Chicago was at the epicenter of that rupture.
Third, a case study of this importance must provide data that are sufficiently
persuasive of its central claims at the local level but also “scale up” to the state,
regional, and national levels of analysis. With respect to voting data, propo­
nents of the dominant voter-centered approaches to electoral politics may insist
that only individual-level survey data can provide evidence for the arguments
advanced here. To this, I apply Adam Przeworski and John Sprague’s famous
line that “this study is a study of voting, but not of voters” (1986, 3-4, 10-11).
That is, my focus is not on the individual-level determinants of vote choice, but
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
21
rather the effect of party development and practices on large-scale social trans­
formations. In any case, individual-level survey data are simply unavailable for
the period in question: pollsters and social scientists only began administering
surveys in the 1930s. Accordingly, I cross-check individual-level manuscript cen­
sus data on ethnic and socioeconomic settlement patterns in Chicago from Einhorn (1991) and Hirsch (1990) against archival ward-level electoral returns to
present the most accurate picture possible of changing voting patterns by ward.
I also track the development of the critique of wage dependency through a con­
tent analysis of party and labor newspapers and the minutes of labor meetings
and rallies. For insight into the importance of patronage, factionalism, and other
“backstage” party dynamics, I look to the private papers of party leaders and
operatives. Lastly, because Chicago and Illinois politics were so central to the
political crisis over slavery and the titanic clashes between capital and labor after
the war, I make a special effort to draw on archival data that put local players in
direct conversation with statewide, regional, and national figures.
Chapter Organization
For those eager to plot the arc of the narrative, I provide a brief preview here.
Chapters 2 through 5 are the key thematic chapters that drive the momentum
of the narrative, from the Jacksonian era, through the political crisis over slavery
and the Civil War, and ending with the doctrine of free contract, the right to
work, and antilabor state violence after the war.
Chapter 2, the first thematic chapter, answers the question: What was the
critique of wage dependency and just how mainstream was it? It examines the
ways in which the Democrats and Whigs sought to articulate workers to their
respective parties through economic policy. This political project was anchored
in a framework of civic standing that celebrated self-sufficiency especially among
farmers and artisans and stigmatized wage workers, slaves, and women for rely­
ing on others for their own survival. The leaders of each party accordingly
worked to frame their policies as ones that would enable less affluent white men
to become or remain economically independent.
In Chicago, the foregoing national narrative manifested itself in the domi­
nance of the Democratic Party under the leadership of Chicago Democrat editor
and U.S. congressman John Wentworth. The early Democratic organization was
strongest in the north and west sides of Chicago, where German and Irish immi­
grant workers predominated, and weakest on the Lakeshore where the affluent
native-born minority resided.
22
CHAPTER 1
Chapter 3 addresses why the critics of wage dependency reorganized in favor
of a liberal capitalist democracy. The answer lies in the back-and-forth politi­
cal struggle to articulate workers and other constituents as northerners in the
decade and a half before the Civil War. A battle for leadership succession in
the Democratic Party in 1844 prefigures this monumental transformation, for
the losing faction in that conflict would later oppose the expansion of slavery
to the western territories as Free Soil Democrats and eventually as Republicans.
Free Soil Democrats insisted that the westward migration of southern planters
would prevent white workers from resettling as farmers in the West.
The split over territorial policy led to a rift between the Illinois Democratic
organization led by Stephen A. Douglas and the Chicago Democratic machine
led by John Wentworth, who took up the Free Soil banner as Congress debated
the status of slavery in the newly conquered northern half of Mexico known as
the Mexican cession. The emergence of the Free Soil cause, in turn, prompted
Chicago workers to establish their first political organization, a chapter of the
National Reform Association, which likewise sought to bar slavery from the
western territories for fear that planters would monopolize the land and con­
demn workers to a life of industrial servitude. Eventually, the Democrats’ once
dominant coalition of Irish and German majority-worker wards fractured and
gave way to a Republican free labor coalition of German majority-worker and
native-born middle-class to affluent wards.
Chapter 4 answers the relatively straightforward question, “What was the rela­
tionship between Chicago parties and workers during the war?” Though workers
responded enthusiastically when their political leaders called on them to fight at
the start of the war and rallied behind their assassinated leader Abraham Lincoln
at war’s end, in between they had become observably alienated from the political
establishment. By 1864, Chicago workers had organized a multiethnic citywide
labor federation called the General Trades Assembly and published their own
newspaper, the Workingman’s Advocate, in a bid to establish a prolabor lobby
The political strategy of Chicago’s incipient labor movement was to support only
prolabor candidates, regardless of party affiliation. These developments com­
prised an intermediate stage on the way to organized labor’s wholesale repudia­
tion of the party system during Reconstruction.
The last narrative chapter answers the question, “What were the implications
of the North’s victory in the Civil War for the political relationship between par­
ties and workers?” While Chicago workers continued to protest their deteriorat­
ing conditions, now in an emerging liberal democratic order formally without
slavery, the major parties responded by equating collective bargaining with the
slave power as related conspiracies against individual freedom. When liberalism’s
TRACING THE ORIGINS OF RIGHT TO WORK
23
contractual vision of a free society failed to peaceably articulate Chicago workers
into mainstream politics, party leaders used state violence to subdue labor’s
revolt and rationalized their military offensive as a safeguard to the right to work.
Workers meanwhile saw the parties’ abandonment of the critique of wage
dependency and the antilabor violence it permitted as a betrayal of their mili­
tary service and the promise of the war, which they saw as nothing less than the
emancipation of white men from permanent industrial servitude. Accordingly,
Chicago workers took the cause of their economic independence into their own
hands by striking for an eight-hour day, which they thought would provide some
semblance of independence by allowing equal time for work, rest, and leisure. In
addition, they organized a Workingman’s Party and established revolutionary
organizations. Throughout this period, white workers increasingly referred to
themselves as a class at odds with the class of capitalists and their allies in the
political establishment.
The concluding chapter circles back to the first and answers the question,
“What can the origins of right to work teach us about the condition of Ameri­
can workers and the U.S. labor movement under neoliberalism?” It teaches us
first that the antilabor ethos of nineteenth-century liberalism is alive and well.
Contemporary right to work rhetoric derives from the original postbellum claim
that workers must be free to bargain with their employers on an individual basis.
Second, it tells us that workers are not likely to take the status quo lying down.
As they did during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, contemporary American
workers have come out en masse to resist the widening economic inequality of
the neoliberal order. Finally, the story of antilabor democracy in Chicago sug­
gests that though workers are not doomed by liberalism, they nevertheless face
their forebears’ battle to preserve labor rights in a context that has been histori­
cally hostile to collective bargaining. The state is not their only obstacle, however,
for the peculiar intersection of race and class in the founding of American lib­
eral democracy framed economic independence (or in contemporary parlance,
a middle-class lifestyle) as a distinctly white privilege. Rather than challenge the
racialized basis of this fantasy, the Obama administration has revived its promise
by closely courting the support of white middle-class suburban voters, secure
in its prediction that racial minorities, including now Latinos, will flock to the
president’s standard for lack of any viable party alternative. The potential for
rebirth in the U.S. labor movement will hinge on its ability to forge a path of
political independence, rejecting both the hostility of the Republican Party and
its status as a captured constituency in the Democratic Party.
2
THE CRITIQUE OF WAGE DEPENDENCY,
1828-1844
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
— Francis Scott Key (1814)
In this third verse of “The Star Spangled Banner,” Francis Scott Key draws a dis­
tinction between the United States and Great Britain. Key, like many of his coun­
trymen at the time, believed that Britain was ruled by an aristocracy, and that as
in any such arrangement, those who fought in defense of the aristocracy did so
only because they were fundamentally unfree; unfree, in that they were wholly
dependent on their lords and masters either for wages, as in the case of “the hire­
ling,” or for their room and board, as in the case of “the slave.” Thus, when Key
writes that neither could be saved “from the terror of flight or the gloom of the
grave,” he is in fact boasting that even as the British shelled a Baltimore fort in
1814, the minions of the monarch could not be saved from the terrible onward
march of American liberty.
“The Star Spangled Banner” evinces a central feature of early American politi­
cal discourse, namely, a deep distrust for any form of government that would
nurture dependency as the natural condition of men. It is anchored in what
Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1994) have referred to in another context as
the “discourse of dependency.” This discourse, which Finds its ideological ori­
gins in the republicanism of the American Revolution, placed a premium on a
man’s capacity to live independently of naked economic interest (Banning 1978;
McCoy 1980; Pocock 1975; Wood 1969, 1992). By this logic, those who were
dependent on others for their own survival—wage workers, women, children,
and slaves—could not be trusted with the welfare of the republic as a whole.
24
THE CRITIQUE OF WAGE DEPENDENCY, 1828-1844
25
In their desperation, they might be persuaded to sell their political support in
exchange for some monetary remuneration (Boydston 1990; Roediger 1991;
Wood 1992). By contrast, white male artisans and family farmers were viewed
as the icons of independence, for it was imagined that they lived comfortably
enough off their own labor that they could steer the course of the republic with­
out prejudice to their own enrichment. Dependency and citizenship were there­
fore not categories that applied evenly to everyone: they referred to specific racial,
class, age and gender groupings. One of the central preoccupations of the Jackso­
nian two-party system, then, was enabling the economic and political indepen­
dence of white men.
This chapter foregrounds what most other studies of large-scale social trans­
formation have slighted—that 1) political parties used evocative discursive tropes
to shape voters’ identities and interests; and 2) voters must recognize themselves
in the rhetorical appeals of politicians for social transformation to take hold.
Although I take economic change as seriously as other scholars of this period do, I
contend that such change does not lead inexorably to a certain kind of politics. In
the last century, we have seen fascists, socialists, nationalists, and liberals press the
theme of economic change into the service of radically different political agen­
das. Likewise in the Jacksonian era, Democrats argued that the emerging “market
revolution” would result in the economic dependency of the common man, while
the opposition Whig Party countered that the market revolution signaled a new
age of shared prosperity and insisted that the Democrats’ demagogical resistance
to commercial measures would stall progress and deprive farmers and workers
of a shot at economic independence in the new economy. In doing so, the Whigs
argued, Democrats made the common man the party’s political dependent. In
sum, neither “the economy” nor “economic interest” has an objective face— they
are continually interpreted and reinterpreted by parties in struggle.
The articulation of competing electoral coalitions and cleavages notwith­
standing, politicians are not free to interpret these matters in anyway they please.
Rather they are constrained by a common set of inherited rhetorical devices that
they deploy to frame and counterframe the fundamental divisions of Ameri­
can society in ways that authorize their own party as the “natural” governing
party and disqualify the opposition as the embodiment, for instance, of all that is
“un-American.” To use a contemporary international example, post-Soviet Rus­
sian politicians use the specter of Stalinism to undermine the credibility of their
political adversaries. Similarly, in the Jacksonian era, each party stigmatized the
other as the agents of dependency, alike in every way to the British aristocracy,
while drawing a direct line of succession between their own party and the patriot
ranks of the American Revolution.